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Towards the R package emdat: Losses from Global Disasters, Part 1

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The International Disaster Database, EM-DAT from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED, Belgium) is often used as a reference for losses on human life and property resulting from natural and man-made disasters. This database has over 20,000 country-level records from the early 1900s to the present. Data is available for free from EMDAT.

Some Cons:

Some cleaning of the data is required. For instance, the country names used by EMDAT are not always the same as those used by ISO. Hence, making spatial maps in R would involving fixing these names.

Information such as GDP, population and Consumer Price Index have to be used to “normalize” or adjust monetary losses from the past. The EMDAT database does not provide such information.

Annual reports published by EMDAT are not consistent with one another in terms of number of disasters per year or the total number of people affected/killed.

My goal is to create an R package which comes with pre-processed and cleaned EMDAT data and which would also include above-mentioned additional country-level information. Moreover, this R package would have the functionality to extract and analyze the data.